Why use Lisp languages?

Power, speed, flexibility, and ease of development

The party line on Lisp is that it's an academic language used only
by completely impractical Artificial Intelligence researchers.

I don't think I can do any better at explaining why you should
COMPLETELY IGNORE the party line, and use Lisp than
Paul Graham does in his article
on how he made Yahoo
Store using Lisp. But, I can add additional information to what he
has to say.

First of all, there are two major Lisp types in use today: Scheme,
and Common Lisp. In general Scheme is a simpler language and is quite
suitable for a large variety of tasks. It has been especially
successful as an embedded language (see
The Gimp, which uses scheme to
process images automatically, and
GNU Guile a
scheme interpreter used in Gnome for
examples).

Common Lisp is a very robust language suitable for any task you can
imagine. There are three main implementations which are free to use,
and various commercial implementations. See the
references at the end of the document for more
information.

First let me give you a few myths you will hear about Lisp, and
tell you why they are wrong.

Myth: Lisp is slow.

There are excellent compilers available for both Common Lisp and
Scheme. The compilers generate code that is comperable in efficiency
to reasonably well written C++. Lisp allows you to program in so many
different styles that it is relatively easy to write something that
works, but does not use the most efficient methods, whereas C/C++
encourage highly efficient coding but it generally takes considerably
longer to write something that works at all. Lisp will generally
smoke
Java code and provides much more consistency in development and run
times.

Myth: Lisp is only for AI.

Lisp is frequently used by Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers
but only because they recognize the tremendous advantages from using
Lisp. Other people who recognize these advantages are:

There are many others, and clearly Lisp can be used in any major
computing task.

Myth: Lisp only has lists, no other data types.

This objection is usually made by people who used Lisp in a
computer science class. The classes typically focus on the power of
lists, but for pedagogical reasons do not actually teach the full
power of Lisp.

Myth: Lisp is out of date

Lisp has been around for a long
time. John McCarthy invented Lisp in the late 1950's. But Lisp is so
powerful, and has so many features that are fundamental to the very
concept of programming that it will be around for many years to
come. Unlike Fortran or COBOL this is a language with so much power
that it will never be considered an old clunky language.

So why don't more people use Lisp? The power of momentum as
described in Paul Graham's article cited above. If you are looking to
make a fast break, and produce high quality software as quickly and
reliably as possible, contact me and let me help you learn Lisp, and
give your projects a powerful technical edge that your competition
won't bother to find out about until it's too late.